Re: War. War never changes. (Except when it does)
Posted: Sat Dec 27, 2014 12:32 pm
I think I can safely say that at this point I don't believe North Korea is responsible for the attack. The evidence the FBI has given is far too circumstantial, and the attackers never even mentioned The Interview until the media started speculating on whether it was North Korean retaliation for the movie. (The FBI claims it has more evidence that it hasn't disclosed. I'm sure it does. I'm not sure that it says what the FBI claims it does.)
Which isn't to say that I have a working idea of who IS responsible for the attack, or if it's even multiple parties as the Reddit summary Grath posted suggests. Inside job is a plausible theory, but just because people are claiming credit and saying that's what it was doesn't mean it's true.
There are some good summaries of the debate at Wired, NPR, and the NYT. The Times article, in particular, is interesting to me for this bit on translation errors:
So it's all pretty inconclusive. I wouldn't be surprised if someone DID turn up stronger evidence of a North Korean connection, but I'm leaning away from that right now.
(And again, admins, if we could get a Sony Pictures Breach splitmerge from the four different threads this conversation has gone in, I'd appreciate it. When you get the chance.)
Which isn't to say that I have a working idea of who IS responsible for the attack, or if it's even multiple parties as the Reddit summary Grath posted suggests. Inside job is a plausible theory, but just because people are claiming credit and saying that's what it was doesn't mean it's true.
There are some good summaries of the debate at Wired, NPR, and the NYT. The Times article, in particular, is interesting to me for this bit on translation errors:
On Wednesday, one alternate theory emerged. Computational linguists at Taia Global, a cybersecurity consultancy, performed a linguistic analysis of the hackers’ online messages — which were all written in imperfect English — and concluded that based on translation errors and phrasing, the attackers are more likely to be Russian speakers than Korean speakers.
Such linguistic analysis is hardly foolproof. But the practice, known as stylometry, has been used to contest the authors behind some of history’s most disputed documents, from Shakespearean sonnets to the Federalist Papers.
Shlomo Argamon, Taia’s Global’s chief scientist, said in an interview Wednesday that the research was not a quantitative, computer analysis. Mr. Argamon said he and a team of linguists had mined hackers’ messages for phrases that are not normally used in English and found 20 in total. Korean, Mandarin, Russian and German linguists then conducted literal word-for-word translations of those phrases in each language. Of the 20, 15 appeared to be literal Russian translations, nine were Korean and none matched Mandarin or German phrases.
Mr. Argamon’s team performed a second test of cases where hackers used incorrect English grammar. They asked the same linguists if five of those constructions were valid in their own language. Three of the constructions were consistent with Russian; only one was a valid Korean construction.
“Korea is still a possibility, but it’s much less likely than Russia,” Mr. Argamon said of his findings.
Even so, Taia Global’s sample size is small. Similar computerized attempts to identify authorship, such as JStylo, a computerized software tool, requires 6,500 words of available writing samples per suspect to make an accurate finding. In this case, hackers left less than 2,000 words between their emails and online posts.
So it's all pretty inconclusive. I wouldn't be surprised if someone DID turn up stronger evidence of a North Korean connection, but I'm leaning away from that right now.
(And again, admins, if we could get a Sony Pictures Breach splitmerge from the four different threads this conversation has gone in, I'd appreciate it. When you get the chance.)